Hammered [3] (28 page)

I would have done the same to Leif when I first met him, if Hal had not introduced us and taken care to warn me ahead of time that he was very nice for a dead guy. Though I was aloof at first, gradually I realized that Hal was right and I came to enjoy Leif’s company—even considering him a friend. I was not sure anymore if Leif’s regard for me had ever been genuine.

His tale also made me wonder if he knew what I could do to him if I so chose. He became a vampire after the fall of the Druids, and most likely his maker, Zdenik, had as well—though I was basing that guess entirely on
his ethnic name and the conjecture that vampires had not yet penetrated into Bohemia by the sixth century. But Zdenik had probably been made by one of the Romans, and they could have told him what Druids could do, and he in turn could have told Leif. I suspected that asking Leif about it would be wasted breath, so I cleared it from my mind. Something else leaped in to occupy it, a horrible gestalt that had been bubbling up to the surface all the while.

Leif knew I’d have doubts after he said those things, and he also knew with full certainty that I’d take him to Asgard anyway. Why?

The chilling conclusion I reached was that I
had
given Leif my word, and any creature capable of waiting for centuries to get his revenge would not hesitate to use any leverage he could to ensure I followed through. Any creature capable of suffering what he had suffered would not blanch at inflicting a bit of suffering on others. He knew who my loved ones were. He knew where they lived.

Almost as soon as I thought this, I rejected it as unworthy. No one could be so Machiavellian. Not even Machiavelli.

And the simple solution—to unbind him like any other vampire and have done with it—was not so simple, aside from being completely dishonorable. He had drunk gallons of my blood; it was part of him now. If I unbound him, might I do some damage to myself in the process? I had no way of knowing. There was no precedent for this. And now was not the time for figuring it all out, because people were staring at me and I wasn’t sure why. Had I been thinking aloud?

Zhang Guo Lao cleared up my confusion by politely inquiring if we had bonded sufficiently for a trip to Asgard.

“Oh. We have made excellent progress,” I replied, extremely relieved that this was all he wanted to know. “But more must be done, I’m afraid.”

“Tomorrow night, then,” Leif said, standing up and nodding at me, his face inscrutable. “I wish you all a good day.”

“Rest well,” Gunnar told him, and the others expressed similar sentiments. Leif bowed to us and left the circle of firelight, off to find someplace to hide from the sun.

Gunnar and I took a walk around the lake after dawn, when Leif was truly asleep.

“Are you still going through with it after that?” he asked with no preamble, sure that I would take his meaning.

“Leif seems certain I will.”

“Yes, he does. I don’t know what game he’s playing. I’m hoping it’s the kind where we’re on one side and the Norse are on the other.”

“As opposed to what?”

“Every man for himself.”

“Ah. Well, I can’t speak for him or what side he’s on. But I’m on your side,” I replied, and then tossed my chin at the other members of our party. “And I’m on theirs too.”

The alpha squinted at me. “So you don’t think we need to do anything?”

“Not right now. Let’s see what happens in round two.”

That began almost as soon as Leif rose after sundown. He asked me to talk with him a discreet distance away from the night’s campfire. Gunnar asked a question with his eyes, and I shook my head ever so slightly. He let us go alone.

We walked in silence along the lakeshore for perhaps a hundred yards, hands in pockets and staring at the ground. Leif seemed to be waiting for me to speak first,
but he was the one who’d asked if we could talk. Finally he stopped and I stopped too, turning to face him.

“You have had the day to grow angry with me, and yet I still find myself here, head on my shoulders and with a stake-free chest,” he said. “You are a good man, Atticus.”

“And you are a charming vampire.”

He nodded ruefully. “I deserve that. I understand, I do. But I hope you realize that I did not make some kind of Freudian slip last night. I confessed it very purposefully.”

“For what purpose?”

“Complete candor between us.”

“How refreshing. Why tell me now?”

“Because that is what friends
do
, Atticus. It is true that when we first met I was playing a part. You had something I wanted, and befriending you was the only way to get it. But in that long process—our physical and verbal sparring matches, your attempts to modernize my language, actually fighting side by side—I discovered that I genuinely like you. And for several years now I have not had to act.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I’m having difficulty believing that. Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest explanation is the correct one. And the simplest explanation is that you are a manipulative bastard like every other vampire.”

“Atticus,
I had no need to say anything
. You were going to fulfill your oath anyway. The simplest explanation for that—the
only
explanation—is that I wanted to say it, to give you my trust and pay you this compliment, to tell you freely that I value your friendship, I will not betray it, and I will hold nothing back from you again. I am tired of all my secrets.”

I still had my doubts, but that was clearly what he had wanted to say to me, and he expected me to buy it.
Maybe I would later; his actions would prove him true or false. My best move was to accept his explanation and be wary. Perhaps he was truly being genuine with me, but there was no way I could fully trust him again, and I’d have to act the friend from now on.

“You wish to share your secrets?” I asked. I tilted my head and smirked. “Vampire secrets?”

Leif raised his hands by way of qualification. “Only with you. No one else can know.”

“So you’re saying I can ask you anything right now about vampires and you’ll answer it truthfully?” I was grinning.

He dropped his hands and sighed in resignation, believing he knew what was coming. “Go ahead,” he said dully.

“Tell me everything you know about the whereabouts of Theophilus.”

I caught a brief flash of genuine surprise. He’d thought I was going to ask him whether vampires poop or something unimportant like that. Why should such things matter? There were far weightier questions on my mind. If this mysterious Theophilus was truly older than me, then he’d probably know who was behind the old Roman pogrom against Druids. He might turn out to be the one behind it himself. Such a creature was worth seeking out.

“And no equivocations,” I added. “I want your best guess at where he is right now and how to make contact with him.”

“Do you intend to end his existence?” Leif asked.

“Not unless he gives me cause. I merely wish to chat.”

“He will wonder how you found him.”

“I’ll tell him I guessed.”

“He will know it is a lie. The quickening of your pulse, the tiny chemicals escaping from your skin, analysis of your expression—he will know someone told you and demand you reveal your source.”

“He can demand all he wants. He cannot take the information from me by force, Leif. You know this.”

“I do not,” Leif said, shaking his head emphatically.

“What do you mean? He’s telepathic?”

“I mean I sincerely do not know. I have never met him. My information on him is vague and extremely suspect.”

“Whatever. Bring it,” I said. “He’ll never know from me that you ever spoke a word.”

Leif flared his nostrils and exhaled heavily through them, frustrated. “He is said to divide his time between Greece, Vancouver, and a small tropical town in Australia called Gordonvale. He follows the clouds.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He wants overcast skies. He is supposedly so old, so powerful, that he is capable of walking abroad in daytime for brief periods if it is not full daylight.”

My eyebrows crept up my forehead. “Can you do this?”

“No. It takes a tremendous effort for me to remain awake past dawn, even in a sunless basement.”

“Hmm. You mentioned Greece. In what part of Greece?”

“Thessaloniki.”

I frowned. “That is not an especially overcast city.”

Leif shrugged. “My own private theory is that he is from there originally.”

That fit with his Greek name, anyway. I kept firing questions at Leif and watching him carefully for signs of prevarication. If he was lying, he was deucedly good at it. Whether they turned out to be true or not, they were leads, at least, something to pursue in the very coldest of cases. And his seeming candor allowed me to hope that perhaps he truly wished us to be friends.

We spent that night and the next telling stories of our respective pasts—sometimes jokes that didn’t make any
sense when translated to English, sometimes adventures in distant lands and in cultures that have long since faded. We tried to top one another in The Weirdest Shit I Ever Ate contest (Väinämöinen won). Zhang Guo Lao pulled out his fish drum and tried to play something along with Väinämöinen’s
kantele
, but it turned out to be a clash of musical styles that’s best forgotten, sort of like Indonesian Folk Death Polka.

Leif didn’t ask to drink any of my blood, and I didn’t offer. Neither did anyone else. He seemed no worse off for it, so he clearly didn’t need to drink every evening.

After the third night of storytelling, I examined the bonds between us and saw that they had strengthened considerably. I felt I had a good grasp of who these men were now.

“Gentlemen, I believe we are ready,” I told them. “Tomorrow night, we will go to the Norse plane.”

Getting five men to simultaneously touch me and the root of a tree was vaguely akin to a game of homoerotic Twister, and I almost giggled—especially since their expressions practically broadcast that they were asking themselves, “Is this gay?” That would have lost me major testosterone points, though, so I firmly refocused my mind on the task and pulled us through to the Norse plane.

This time, the Well of Mimir was being watched. An eagle let out one of those “Ee-yaahh!” cries that now remind me of the title music to
The Colbert Report
, and we all turned our heads to find the source.

“That’s no bird,” Väinämöinen said after a second’s hesitation. “That’s a frost giant.” His magical vision was as good as mine, if not better. When I looked at the eagle’s aura, it didn’t look like a bird of prey. It looked like a huge biped in ice blue. “You’re up, Atticus.”

I’d been elected to do all the talking, if any were to be done. Väinämöinen spoke Old Norse, but Leif spoke it better, so the vampire would act as translator to the rest of the group.

“Greetings, noble sir. May we speak with you?” I asked the eagle. “We have come to Jötunheim to have words with Hrym, if that is possible.”

The eagle leapt from its perch and turned into a towering giant, shaking the earth and sending sheets of snow into the air as it landed. He was twelve feet tall, with skin a few shades lighter than the blue people in
Avatar
. His beard had real hair, but it was sheathed in ice, as were his eyebrows. His tangle of dark hair was tipped with highlights of white frost. Despite his obvious cold, he wore nothing but a fur about his loins, which made me wonder: If the frost giants figured out that a fur would keep their privates a bit warmer, why didn’t they figure out that
more
furs would keep the rest of them warm? Did they never worry about hypothermia? Considering their elemental nature, they were most likely immune to it, and their scant clothing and shivery appearance was calculated to cause hypothermia in all who gazed upon them.

“Who are you?” he demanded. His voice was like barrels rolling down a dock.

“No friends to the Æsir,” I assured him, thinking that was probably more important than our names. I offered those next, and since he had yet to squash us into jelly, I thought relations were proceeding remarkably well.

The frost giant fixed Perun with an icy glare (what other kind of glare could he possibly deliver?). “Graah. I do not like thunder gods. Do not trust them. What words do you have for Hrym?”

“We can end the tyranny of the Æsir tonight, or the next, or whensoever the frost Jötnar choose. Odin is vulnerable, and he knows it not. Thor is crippled, yet he knows not how. Freyja is there for the taking. The Norns are dead. All of Asgard is a fruit waiting to be plucked if Hrym feels hungry.”

The giant laughed like someone with severe respiratory symptoms. “Mrr-hhr-hwauugh! What nonsense is this? You think scrawny snacks like you can defeat the Æsir?”

There is no use in bandying words with the muscle-bound and oafish. They communicate physically, and that is the only way they can be reached. I turned to the immortal Zhang Guo Lao and spoke to him in Mandarin. “Master Zhang, I believe he needs a brief lesson in manners. Perhaps you could show him how to speak on our level.”

A flicker of a smirk played under the wispy mustache of the ancient alchemist, and he afforded me a brief bow. He shrugged off his pack and set his fish drum aside, drawing out one of its iron rods.

“Allow my comrade to show you a glimpse of our power,” I said to the giant, switching back to Old Norse. “Perhaps you will be willing to hear more when you have seen what we can do.”

“Hrrgh!” the Jötunn snorted. “What can this old man do? Fart on me?”

I hope I never get taken down by a fart the way Zhang Guo Lao took down that frost giant. He swung a high kick to the giant’s kneecap to begin with, just to let him know he was serious. The giant bellowed and kicked spastically at Zhang with the same leg. Zhang grabbed on and then leapt up at the giant’s face, somersaulting until his spread legs approached the giant’s throat. These he locked around the giant’s neck, then hung upside down, and the giant’s eyes widened in surprise: How’d he get saddled so quickly with an old-guy necklace? His massive hands moved toward his chest, obviously intending to grab Zhang and yank him off, but Zhang wasn’t merely hanging out. While performing a sort of extended crunch, he used his iron rod to administer surgical blows to various pressure points on the giant’s chest and neck—
thup-thunk-thak-thunk-thup
. After the last one, the giant’s hands stopped moving. He was paralyzed from the waist up. Zhang, still hanging upside down, relaxed and spread his arms wide in a sort of
“ta-da!” gesture. I led our group in a round of appreciative golf claps. The giant slowly processed what was happening and staggered about, trying to get his upper body to move. When he lurched back a step, Zhang bent at the waist until he could grab on to a couple of beardcicles. Then he allowed his feet to slide from around the giant’s neck, planted them against the giant’s collarbones, and sprang backward as if he were participating in a high dive competition. After a bunch of twists and flippy thingies—I’m not a gymnastics expert—he landed gracefully on his feet, if somewhat deeply in the snow. The frost giant fell backward in a markedly graceless fashion, propelled by Zhang’s kickoff. Unable to windmill his arms for balance, the giant roared his frustration all the way down and crunched loudly (and wetly) into the snow.